This summer Mary Szybist, whose husband I am, preceded me to Italy. I left on a Saturday afternoon, which meant that, with the time change, I didn’t arrive in Rome until Sunday afternoon. People who know me–and Mary knows me well–know that I attend Mass on Sundays, so Mary scoped out a church with a Sunday evening service, about a half-mile from our hotel. We arrived early at a very baroque neighborhood church.
As we sat I noticed that people kept walking up toward the altar and looking to the left. I remarked on this to Mary, who said that she thought there was a famous statue of St. Teresa of Avila in the church.
I said, “Maybe it’s Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa and the angel,” meaning the suggestion as a joke.
“I think that’s the one,” she said.
Categorically and without doubt, I replied, “No, Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa is not in this church. It’s in a museum or a cathedral somewhere.”
But I was curious to see what the object of everyone’s gaze was. Most likely the reader already knows what I saw, Bernini’s statue the “Ecstasy of St. Teresa.” I recognized it immediately from the photograph on the cover of my copy of St. Teresa’s The Way of Perfection: the angel, wielding a golden arrow, standing above St. Teresa, who leans back with an otherworldly look of erotic passion on her face. The statue is inspired by a passage in Teresa’a Autobiography, describing a mystical experience that she underwent.
Perhaps I should point out two things. The first is that I am very skeptical about the idea of going to a place to look at art or architecture or anything else for the purpose of being emotionally stirred. I’m very much in favor of looking at art, architecture, etc., but whether I’m worked into an emotional state is a matter of indifference. Sentimentality and kitsch can murmur in a hyped-up emotional language about as well as anything else, and I’d prefer not to insult great art with my sentimentality. Paul Ricoeur makes a distinction between emotion and feeling, the latter of which are emotions transformed into the more distanced responses provoked by art and literature. There is of course more to be said about the matter, but I shall leave further explanation for later.
The second thing to point out is that while I’m very much in favor of museums, I’m capable of seeing art in a museum for maybe an hour or so, maybe less. Pretty soon, even though I’m still looking, what I’m seeing are the stereotyped versions of things, versions I could have just as well seen in photographs in books; as I continue looking, I’m losing the distinctiveness of things. Walker Percy talks about this dynamic in his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he discusses how once a painting, say, has been reproduced on postcards, calendars, and key rings, and one repeatedly happens into these things, it’s difficult to see the actual painting in any way other than the glossed-over image its reproductions have made it. Even standing in front of the painting, one might as well be staring at a key ring. This is a difficulty I’ve faced many times.
But that day in the church, having arrived to pray Mass and not expecting to see a famous statue, I seem actually to have seen Bernini’s great work in a way that I could not have seen it otherwise. And in spite of my skeptical stance about emotional stirrings, I found myself quite moved. Later, after Mass, walking back to the hotel, I tried to talk about the statue with Mary, but my voice kept failing.
One thing I noticed that I had never quite seen before is the expression on the angel’s face. In contrast to Teresa’s look of ecstasy, the angel appears a little bit bored, as if to say, This surely is something spectacular to you, but this is just what we angels do, a rather commonplace event for me. At the same time, the angel’s face has a subtly impish expression. I came to think of the angel as one of God’s tricksters. In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde discusses how the figure of the trickster traditionally patrols as well as crosses boundaries, the way Hermes oversees the boundary between the living and the dead, a boundary that he escorts humans across on their way to the underworld. So here is the trickster angel seeing St. Teresa momentarily across a boundary that usually separates human experience from the intensive touch of the divine.
Perhaps great art in some ways can similarly escort us across such boundaries as separate the everyday world of distractedness from a realm of more intensively experienced meaning. In The Analogical Imagination, David Tracy discusses how a classic can sweep one up in its particularity such that in the moment of the classic’s disclosure, one not only interprets the classic, but is also interpreted by the classic. Of course, in one sense that day in the church I was standing there looking at stone. But in the moment of the statue’s disclosure, I think I felt the stone stare back.